the colour of An­ar­chy

avalanche and Id on their vi­brant post-apoca­lypse

n That bright pink and yel­low ad­ver­tis­ing cam­paign around Rage 2 isn’t a piece of mis­di­rec­tion on the part of Avalanche and id. It’s a gen­uine re­flec­tion of a new, more vi­brant and colour­ful back­drop for Rage 2 and the op­por­tu­ni­ties that new tech­nol­ogy have opened up for the team. “A lot of that ac­tu­ally came from, first, the de­sire to push it far from Rage,” re­veals id stu­dio direc­tor Tim Wil­lits. “And then look­ing at what the Apex tech­nol­ogy could do for us with the jun­gles and the forests and the swamps and the over­grown cities. And that brought to us light and colour with the veg­e­ta­tion. That led us to have more colour­ful char­ac­ters, and peo­ple have evolved and let us have more colour­ful build­ings and skies. And now we have a mar­ket­ing cam­paign. So it’s re­ally helped es­tab­lish a unique iden­tity in this world that’s some­times crowded with brown games.” There re­mains a con­scious­ness within the de­vel­op­ment team, how­ever, that some con­nect­ing thread needs to be main­tained from the orig­i­nal. “You can’t just add colour to any­thing,” warns se­nior game de­signer Loke Wallmo. “So it’s a part of the iden­tity of Rage, as well. It’s sup­posed to be fun, crazy, over-the-top, so it works re­ally well with what we’re try­ing to do with the game­play, with the char­ac­ters, with the fac­tions. It made a lot of sense to make ev­ery­thing as colour­ful as we could.